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How snow can help you get better bird photos

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Photo by Vic Berardi
Photo by Vic Berardi

Photography is all about light and the use of it. Photographing birds in winter brings a special kind of lighting not available during the rest of the year–reflective snow cover. Fresh fallen snow and bright sunlight offer both spectacular results as well as tricky exposure decisions.

Bird photography presents many challenges with the various plumages that are exhibited. Some birds are very pale underneath and some are very dark, creating exposure difficulties for the photographer. Do you expose for the sky but leave the undersides of the bird either overexposed or underexposed? The result of these decisions is many times a poorly exposed photograph. The front lighting that reflective snow cover brings can alleviate some of these decisions. [Read more…] about How snow can help you get better bird photos

How to isolate your subject from the background

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Photo by Matthew Fletcher
Photo by Matthew Fletcher

Isolating your subject can create a powerful image, but have you ever found yourself wondering how to keep your subject sharp while blurring the background? There are two simple keys to achieving this effect:

  • Get close to your subject, while maximizing the distance between your subject and the background
  • Use a large aperture (smaller f-number)

The larger aperture, e.g. f/4, will create a shallow depth of field, which means your subject will be sharp, but anything closer to, or further away from the camera will appear blurry (the opposite is true for smaller apertures, e.g. f/22, where you will have a greater depth of field and more of the image in focus). [Read more…] about How to isolate your subject from the background

How to resize your photos (the “sharp” way)

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Do you constantly find yourself resizing your photos to prepare them for the Internet? Maybe for posting them to a blog, emailing them to a friend, or adding them to your online photo gallery?

Surprisingly, photo resizing (or resampling) involves some very complex computer algorithms. There’s many ways to do it, and I won’t go into all the technical details here, but the bottom line is that the default resizing method in Photoshop isn’t the best one available.

If you change just one setting when resizing your photos, you can get much higher quality results that will even make your photos look sharper!
[Read more…] about How to resize your photos (the “sharp” way)

How to get sharper flower photographs

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Photo by Steve Berardi
Photo by Steve Berardi

This weekend I read an article by Wendy L. Turner in Nature Photographer Magazine, and learned a new tip on how to get sharper flower photographs: position your camera so the sensor is parallel to the most important plane of the flower.

When photographing flowers, you will most likely use a telephoto or macro lens with a wide aperture (to get that great blurry background), so proper focus is very subtle and extremely difficult to achieve.

Positioning your camera so the sensor is parallel to the most important plane of the flower will help put all important parts of the flower at the same distance from your sensor, so all those parts will be in sharp focus. [Read more…] about How to get sharper flower photographs

How to get this photo from the Mojave Desert

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Photo by Steve Berardi
Photo by Steve Berardi

This photo was taken at Joshua Tree National Park, which is in the Mojave Desert of the Southwestern United States.

I think the photo is unique for a couple reasons:

  • Color saturation (those rocks look brown most of the time)
  • It’s a single exposure (I didn’t capture the moon in a separate exposure)

And, here are a couple of tips on how to get this kind of photo: [Read more…] about How to get this photo from the Mojave Desert